I’d heard Quentin Tarantino talk about getting royalties for an episode he did of Golden Girls for years, but I hadn’t seen the video until today, when Miramax tweeted it (check out the video below). In 1988, Tarantino played an Elvis impersonator at Sophia’s wedding – one of several – in an episode that later got put on a best-of compilation.

“Well, it was kind of a high point because it was one of the few times that I actually got hired for a job. I was one of 12 Elvis impersonators, really just a glorified extra. For some reason they had us sing Don Ho’s Hawaiian Love Chant. All the other Elvis impersonators wore Vegas-style jumpsuits. But I wore my own clothes,because I was, like, the Sun Records Elvis. I was the hillbilly cat Elvis. I was the real Elvis; everyone else was Elvis after he sold out.” [Miramax]

(starts at 4:30)

He may be the only Elvis who didn’t sell out, but he’s also the only one who can’t keep a damn beat. Jesus, QT, were you even listening to the song? It looks like he’s dancing to a beat only he and the Coke Wizard can hear.

“I made a lot of money on that one,’ he enthuses. “It was only one small little thing, but the Golden Girls is played very heavily in America and repeated constantly and they took my segment and put it on a best of the Golden Girls episode so I was getting residual checks from both ways.” [Tarantino, in The Cinema of Cool]

I can’t believe “Elvis #4″ gets residuals. He has like three “lines” and he shares them with 12 other people. That couldn’t have been more than an hour of work. Man, acting is such a racket.